


Auld Lang Syne

by WolfSpider



Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-17
Updated: 2019-01-17
Packaged: 2019-10-11 12:10:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17446721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WolfSpider/pseuds/WolfSpider
Summary: Miles still remembers Peter B Parker, because Peter is worth remembering.





	Auld Lang Syne

**Author's Note:**

> I know the end of the movie kind of implies that voluntary dimensional travel is possible but what can I say, I love pining.

On the third anniversary of the death of the OG Spider Man, when Miles is seventeen, they finally shut down Peter's favorite burger joint in this reality, too. He sees the “CLOSING” sign in the window swinging past in pursuit of the Vulture and spends the rest of the scuffle half distracted, thinking distantly about Peter's failed spider-themed restaurant and a long ago night spent eating fries gone limp with old grease that feels like a fever dream now. By the time sirens are wailing down fifth avenue to collect their avian prize all wrapped up in web and a bow Miles' stomach is stuck to his ribs-- and perched a hundred feet up on a piece of architecture he can't tell if the hunger is as real as the satisfied burn in his tired arm muscles or if it's some sort of wishful placebo effect.

Anyway, for right now, the place is still open late.

It's not like he doesn't think about them anymore, Peter, Gwen, Noir and Peni and Ham. It's just that, scratch that, rewind it, he doesn't. Not intentionally. He's got pictures on his phone in a secret triple password protected file and a sketchbook full of technicolor designs from that first winter after everything was different, stylised versions of everything he could remember about their faces. The way Gwen's hair hung in her eyes sometimes, the V of her not quite buck teeth. The grey shadow of five o'clock stubble that colonized Peter's strong jaw like moss. It's just that, after awhile, he had to put it away.

 _You've got to be realistic, Miles,_ his father's voice says in his head twenty times a day, and it doesn't matter that he was talking about college plans or curfew or his allowance at the time, and not the likelihood of seeing dear friends from other universes again. Because Peter and Gwen-- they're gone from here forever. Meeting them at all was a gift.

There's, like, no one in the restaurant at 4 AM on a Tuesday, which feels familiar, other than the fry cook and a fat mid-fifties Russian man in a wool pull-over with sweat stains around the armpits. You learn to notice people in this job, their presence and their absences, and Miles can't ever turn it off. He takes a corner booth and orders a quarter pounder with extra fries, and pokes around inside himself trying to identify a feeling like touching gingerly around a hurt to find the source of the pain. It's a numbness, a weird sucking empty pressure that wants to make the rest of him empty too.

Miles listens to the sounds of meat frying and splattering on the griddle and the distant crackle of the house radio talking to itself about the Sox and thin traffic outside and a couple up the street arguing, but just in a regular "it's too early for this shit and I'm frustrated" way and not a "this is going to escalate to a domestic abuse charge in about five minutes" way, which is a thing that Miles has sadly learned to differentiate. While he waits to be served his disappointment he pulls his backpack up next to him in the cracking red plastic booth seat and fiddles around inside, pushing down the wadded up black ball of his spider suit and reaching for his sketchpad. Papers get spread and strewn across the slightly tacky surface of the table. Felt tip markers are uncapped. He tries to remember-- anything.

Peter's voice won't come back to him. Inflection was one of the first things to go. Some stuff sticks out in his mind more clearly: the slightly greasy sheen of hair that hadn't had a real wash in a week; the long, thin face; the sad, stubborn set of his eyes. The sweat pants. His hands, big for his frame and still strong, blunt-tipped fingers gnarled around the knuckles that looked sandstone rough. Solid, the only part of Peter that was. Miles sketches. It doesn't have to be completely accurate, that's the neat thing about style. He just has to get the feel of the thing right. Peter's posture, slumped over like all his strings had been cut but still somehow proud.

The essence has been eluding him too, and that's why he stopped. Stopping thinking, stopped drawing. Sooner or later the pictures were just another way to lose him, the less than real supplanting his actual memories, whittling away little by little at his mental image of Peter and replacing it with colorful half-truths. Like the ship of Theseus. How much can you remove, replace before it stops being the same thing?

There aren't a lot of places of much significance to them left that Miles can visit for a refresher. The pilgrimage tour would take him here, the woods in upstate New York, Aunt May's newly refurbished suburban two-storey. But the woods is full of bugs and the wrong kinds of ghosts and he sees Aunt May every Sunday for coaching and this place is almost gone, and this one last memory, fluorescent flickering lights that make the food counter look like a morgue and the taste of a burger he'll finally get to actually eat, will override all else. Maybe that's good. Maybe it's better that way. Miles has a lot of life left ahead of him, and he has to keep moving.

He sketches.

The food arrives on a shallow plastic tray, also slightly sticky, and he shoves his papers aside to make space for it.

One of the really nice things about New York is that no one asks, ever, about anything. Your business is your business, even if your business is screaming about how god and satan are trapped inside you on the L train. No sleepy burger jockey is going to remark on the sheaf of half abandoned scribbles of the same older guy; just drop the food and walk away. Living with a cop, Miles appreciates the general indifference of the regular populace more and more. _Where were you. What did I hear on the fire escape last night. Did you cut class again, Miles? You're going to trip over those bags under your eyes, son._  Part of it's not his fault, just a regular paranoid parental tightening of security after Uncle Aaron's murder made him skittish about the inner city, and part of it's the way his dad's always been, but it's nice to go someplace where nobody knows your name.

That's part of the appeal of being Spiderman, too. Miles could be anyone: awkward teenager, cool punk rock chick, schlubby burnout. He's an avatar, and not himself. He's an avatar and himself. The one thing he isn't, in any world, is Peter Parker.

By the time he gets around to biting into his burger, its gone a little cold. A wash of tepid grease spills down his chin and drips onto the butcher's paper lining the tray while he slowly chews, contemplating the mouthfeel of mealy tomato and crumbling low grade beef. It's not the best burger he's ever had, and it's definitely not the best burger in New York City, but it brings back flashes of watching Peter's mouth move around his sloppy bite of beef and cheese, licking salt from the fries off his fingers, and it makes Miles smile a little. It's a good send off, maybe, to this old place. And to Peter.

Here's the thing: Peter Parker is dead. And the other Peter Parker, the one that Miles met for more than two minutes, he's gone for good. They learned about multiverse theory a little at Visions, string theory and M-theory, learned about how the planes are all layered over each other, stacked together like meat and cheese on a bun, together but separate and utterly impermeable. The air of this universe corroded Peter's atoms one by one to dust. He's incompatible with it, incompatible with Miles, and even if he wasn't tearing the universe a new asshole to cross over and see him might just pull everything apart at the seams in a blast of cotton candy acid trip color. So this is a memorial, the last one. The last ritual remembrance of a friend long passed, and then Miles will be done for good. In three weeks this grubby diner will be an empty storefront and then a bodega or a coin laundry or a secondhand shop or a kosher deli, and Peter Parker will still be dead, and Miles will still be Spider Man, the only Spider Man that there is.

When he's finished, the burger sitting like a lead weight in his stomach, Miles balls up the butcher's paper and his sketches and tosses the whole wad of it. He doesn't look back.

\---

Three weeks later the diner is shuttered. Though its wide windows are dimmed, the alley to the right hides a riot of color: a mural in bright aerosol paint, a portrait of a man who people say, from the right angle if you squint, kind of looks like Peter Parker, god rest him. And then the city's cleaners wash the graffiti away, and even the memory is gone.

**Author's Note:**

> I have way more ideas for fic for this pairing (where they kiss even, maybe), it's just a matter of whether I can make myself write 'em or not.


End file.
